Maison Margiela / Fall 2014 Couture

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One connecting theme has come out of Paris this week—the way major designers have been going back over the history of haute couture: for example, both Raf Simons at Christian Dior and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel wended their ways back to eighteenth-century court dress, and returned with reinterpretations exquisitely remade for modern princesses. Amusingly, this puts Maison Martin Margiela in a plum position this season, since this house was actually founded on the repurposing and reframing of old, vintage, historical things (often including trash) in cool, wearable ways. So: bright and early on Wednesday morning, the audience at the Margiela “Artisanal” show was not given a reproduction of the work of the seminal Parisian couturier Paul Poiret, but confronted by a piece of the actual thing, a beautiful faded brocade vest whose provenance was explained in the program as “Probably part of a costume for an Oriental party given by Denise and Paul Poiret. . . . ” It dates from about 1910, and with forensically transparent accuracy, is noted to have been bought this year in an auction at Drouot in Paris—Lot 26, to be precise. Without a glance at the notes, however, it was the one thing in the collection the women in the room craned their necks to look at and (you can feel these things in the moment) envied most.

Still, that one piece opens up yet another maze of questions and contradictions. Margiela’s “Artisanal” line isn’t officially haute couture at all. Martin Margiela, when he was operating in the nineties, was interested only in elevating cheap, available flea-market items and transforming them into clothes for an egalitarian intelligentsia who enjoyed his antiestablishment subtexts and subtle jokes about fashion. The way Margiela patched in the past was fully in the French “bricolage” tradition—a rough-edged method which was termed “deconstruction” in the nineties. As excellent as it always was, the whole point was the way it was calculated to be outsider; deliberately the kind of clothing rich people would never want or understand.

The baton has now been passed to a younger team, which is operating in a new commerical reality more than twenty years after Margiela began. Probably their customers now are members of the art world—the women who dress to stand out as avant-garde as they negotiate multimillion-dollar transactions in the gallery booths of Miami Art Basel and the Frieze fairs in London and New York. Against that particular social backdrop, this collection makes complete sense. It still looks rough and ready. It is composed of mad things like defunct coins as embroidery, and vintage late forties Japanese souvenir bomber jackets. In 2014, there’s a whole new type of supermoneyed art and music people in the world who value cool over convention. And maybe, they’ll be looking here.